Ericsson, NSN and NYU Wireless ramp up 5G efforts

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) has become the ninth major international technology firm to join NYU Wireless as an affiliate sponsor, giving added momentum to the research center's efforts one week before the start of its inaugural Brooklyn 5G Summit, which is being jointly organized with Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Solutions and Networks.

"We see NYU Wireless as an important partner in the research towards the development of global 5G standards" said Magnus Frodigh, director of wireless access networks research at Ericsson Research.

He added that Ericsson's collaboration with NYU Wireless students and faculty will not only contribute solid research results to the discussion, "but also generate creativity, insights and requirements from the highly dynamic and innovative U.S. wireless marketplace."

NYU Wireless' first 5G summit will be held April 23-25 in Brooklyn, New York. The invitation-only event is jointly organized by NSN, which became NYU Wireless' sixth affiliate sponsor in December 2013. The summit aims to bring together research and development leaders in academia, business and government to explore the future of 5G wireless technology.

Discussion themes will address antenna technologies that exploit beamforming gains at higher frequency bands as well as propagation and channel modeling for new spectrum bands, from 3 to 100 GHz. There will also be presentations focused on key technologies and requirements for 5G.

Under the direction of Ted Rappaport, NYU Wireless' founder and director, the research center has conducted considerable work in the area of millimeter-wave spectrum. NSN and other industry players are working with NYU Wireless to help the overall wireless industry pool data on millimeter-wave spectrum.

"There's broad agreement, which we definitely share, that at some point the industry will need more spectrum for capacity and peak-bit-rate reasons. Millimeter wave is kind of a last frontier for spectrum and could be possibly used for access," Lauri Oksanen, vice president of NSN research and technology, told FierceWirelessTech.

The industry has shown that millimeter-wave spectrum--such as the 60, 70, 80 and 90 GHz bands--can be used for mobile backhaul. "But it's an open question still if it's feasible to use it for mobile access--the connection point between access points and devices--because of propagation differences" and the spectrum's need for line-of-sight or near-line-of-sight propagation, said Oksanen.

"Even though it's early days research for millimeter-wave access systems, there is a fundamental question that should be answered in the early stages before we can really go forward with any kind of reasonable radio access system design. So we thought we would offer this platform [the Brooklyn 5G Summit] for the industry to share views and information and get common agreement between the different research institutes and vendors regarding the possibilities," he added.

New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering launched NYU Wireless in August 2012. NYU Wireless is focused on mass-deployable wireless devices and is the first university center to combine wireless, computing and medical applications research

For more:
- see this Ericsson and NYU release
- see this NSN and NYU Wireless release

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